I.I.S. “G.BRUNO – R.FRANCHETTI” - VENEZIA MESTRE
PROGRAMMA DI LINGUA E CULTURA INGLESE A.S. 2014-2015
DOCENTE: Massimiliano De Villa
CLASSE: 3E
ORE DI LEZIONE SETTIMANALI: 3
Testi adottati:
Marina Spiazzi – Marina Tavella – Margaret Layton, Performer. Culture & Literature 2.
The Nineteenth Century in Britain and America, Zanichelli, Bologna 2012.
Marina Spiazzi – Marina Tavella – Margaret Layton, Performer. Culture & Literature 3.
The Twentieth Century and the Present, Zanichelli, Bologna 2013.
CONTENUTI DISCIPLINARI
a) Early Romanticism
- William Blake: life and works, features and themes, sources and influences, imagination
and symbolism, the poet-prophet, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
From Songs of Innocence and Experience:
- The Lamb
- The Tyger
b) The Romantic period
- Historical background:
The Hanoverians: George III (Napoleon), George IV (Catholic Emancipation – Metropolitan
Police), William IV (First Reform Bill – abolition of slavery – Factory Acts)
- Social background:
Consequences of the Industrial revolution, Combination Acts, Luddities, the Peterloo
Massacre, Robert Owen, emigration, Trade Unions, position of women, abolition of slavery)
- Literary production:
The Romantic Literary Movement: democratic ideals, literary background
Poetry: language and verse form, task of the poet, features and themes, Imagination, Nature
(philosophical theories)
William Wordsworth: life and works, Lyrical Ballads (genesis, realism and poetry,
features), themes (childhood, nature)
From Lyrical Ballads:
Preface to the Second Edition (1800) – “A Certain Colouring of Imagination”
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The Solitary Reaper
My Heart Leaps Up
Samuel T. Coleridge: life and works, features and themes, The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Fancy and Imagination, differences between Wordsworth and Coleridge
From Lyrical Ballads:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (part I, part II, part VII)
From Biographia Literaria:
Genesis of the “Lyrical Ballads” (chapter XIV)
George Byron: life and works, features and themes, romantic and non-romantic elements,
the Byronic hero
From Lara:
The Byronic Hero (stanza XVII)
From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
Apostrophe to the Ocean (canto IV, stanzas CLXXVIII-CLXXXIII)
Sunset in Venetia (canto IV, stanzas XXVII-XXIX)
Other poems:
So we’ll go no more a-roving
She Walks in Beauty
Percy B. Shelley: life and works, features and themes (freedom and love, idealism, lyricism
and symbolism, pantheism, nature and ecstasy)
Ode to the West Wind
John Keats: life and works, features and themes (poetry as solace, beauty, negative
capability, ancient Greece, nature, the Middle Ages), Keats’s influence
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Bright Star
Letter to Fanny Brawne (March 1820)
Visione del film Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)
Prose:
Jane Austen: life and works, features and themes (limitations and great qualities), parody of
Gothicism, literary importance
From Pride and Prejudice
Lettura, traduzione e commento dei capitoli I e XXXIV (“Darcy proposes to Elizabeth”)
- The American Romantic Movement:
Edgar Allan Poe: life and works, the poet and the Poetic Principle (Single effect – brevity),
the decadent romantic, the prose writer and the Tales, Tales of Ratiocination, Tales of
Imagination (themes and features), Poe’s influence
From Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque:
Lettura integrale e analisi del racconto The Masque of the Red Death
c) The Victorian Age
- Historical background:
The Hanoverians: Queen Victoria, inland policy (Chartism, Trade Union Act, Second
and Third Reform Bills, Labour Party, Ireland, Repeal of Corn Laws, Free Trade, Great
International Exhibition, social achievements), foreign policy (Indian Mutiny, British
Empire, The Boer War, the Crimean War), Edward VII (The Edwardian Age, reforms)
- Social background:
The Victorian Age and the Edwardian Age, the Oxford Movement, optimism, social
problems, the Victorian Compromise, Evangelicalism, Fabian Society, respectability, the
Victorian family, the Victorian house, philosophical currents, pessimism)
- Literary production:
literary movements: Late Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Aestheticism,
Decadentism, three stages (Early Victorian – Mid-Victorian – Late Victorian)
Prose:
Fiction: the Victorian novel, causes of its flourishing, serial method, types of novels
Charles Dickens: life and works, features and themes (humour, pathos, the painter of
English life, Christmas, characters, social and humanitarian novels), early and later
novels, symbol and metaphor, limitations and merits
From The Pickwick Papers:
“An Important Proceeding of Mr. Pickwick” (chapter 12)
From A Christmas Carol:
“Scrooge’s Christmas” (chapter 1)
From Oliver Twist:
“Oliver wants some more” (chapter 2)
“Jacob’s Island” (chapter 50)
From Bleak House:
“Fog in London” (chapter 1)
From Hard Times:
“The definition of a horse” (chapter 2)
“Coketown” (chapter 5)
The Brontë Sisters: lives and works
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights (plot, complexity, other features)
From Wuthering Heights:
“The Nature of Love” (chapter IX)
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (plot, characters and themes, a proto-feminist novel)
From Jane Eyre:
“Rochester” (chapter XVII)
Poetry: the major poets, the Pre-Raphaelites, Decadentism, the British Contribution to
Aestheticism
Alfred Tennyson: life and works, features and themes, dramatic monologue: differences
between Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning
Ulysses: lettura e analisi (sources of the poem, lust for life, shift of focus)
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: features and themes
Drama:
Oscar Wilde: life and works, the decadent aesthete and the theme of beauty (The
Picture of Dorian Gray), the dramatist (The Importance of Being Earnest)
From The Picture of Dorian Gray:
The Preface
“Basil’s studio” (chapter 1)
“I would give my soul” (chapter 2)
Lettura integrale e analisi di The Importance of Being Earnest
d) The Twentieth Century
-Historical background:
George V (Insurance Act, Home Rule, The First World War, League of Nations, the
postwar years, General strike, the Irish Question, the Dominions, India), Edward VIII,
George VI (Spanish Civil War, The Second World War), Elizabeth II
- Social background:
the Edwardian Era: social hierarchy, The First World War and the postwar period:
consequences, family structure, the role of women, Modernism, the Second World War
and the postwar period: home front, consequences, Beveridge Report, Welfare State,
“rebel” groups, schooling, cultural revolution, European Economic Community,
Margaret Thatcher
- Literary production:
Prose:
Experimentation
Fiction: main causes of dissatisfaction
The Transition Period: the Edwardians (John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennet, Herbert
George Wells), exoticism (Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad), the psychological novel
(Henry James, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence)
Modernism, stream of consciousness, interior monologue
Virginia Woolf: life and works, features and themes (moments of being, narrative
technique, use of time), style, characters.
Mrs. Dalloway: the story, the setting, a changing society, the connection between
Clarissa and Septimus
From Mrs. Dalloway:
“Clarissa and Septimus”
“Septimus’s Death”
To the Lighthouse: plot, structure, symbolism, use of time
From To the Lighthouse:
“The Brown Stocking”
James Joyce: life and works, Joyce’s conception of the artist, features and themes. First
period: Dubliners (epiphany, The Dead)
From Dubliners:
Eveline
The Dead: “I think he died for me”
Second period: new technique, Ulysses (structure, parallel with the Odissey, interior
monologue)
From Ulysses:
“Molly’s Monologue”
“Mr. Bloom’s Train of Thought”
Gli alunni Il docente
Massimiliano De Villa
Mestre, 05/06/2015